From Mission to Movement: The Impact of Christianity on Patterns on Political Association in Papua New Guinea

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In a recent contribution Harvey Whitehouse suggests that studies of Christianity in Melanesia are in sorry shape. Scholars have, by and large, 'bought' an old missionary argument that the missionization of Melanesia helped to transform tribal fragmentation and localism through the dogma that humans are all God's children (Whitehouse 1998: 43). Whitehouse argues that Christian ideology, which was initially inscrutable to Melanesians, could not have inspired the transcendence of tribal divisions. Instead, it was the distinctive way that Christianity encodes and transmits its dogma that provided Melanesians with the cognitive tools to imagine and create regional communities. Once they became familiar with the doctrinal mode of religiosity in the hot-house conditions of mission stations, some Melanesian converts were able to transfer forms of organization and dissemination of knowledge, shorn of most of their purely Christian ideological elements, and create their own distinctive religious movements.

Although he draws upon the language of cognitive psychology, Whitehouse's argument will be quite familiar to most students of religious transformation in Melanesia and elsewhere. His imagistic and doctrinal modes of religion owe an unacknowledged debt to Weber's classic distinction between traditional and world religions. Whitehouse presents a variation on the shattered microcosm model of religious change whose best known proponent is Robin Horton (1971; 1975; Ranger 1993) in which Christianity is seen as a catalyst but not as a necessary element in the transition from local to regional society. Many scholars have also written on the hegemonic influence of mission routines, particularly in the controlled environment of stations, upon indigenous understandings of space, time, authority and society, most notably Michael French Smith (1982) in Melanesia and Jean and John Comaroff (1991) in southern Africa. These are hardly obscure writers, yet Whitehouse fails to mention their work. Instead, he presents his analysis of conversion as a new argument to counter scholars who argue that …